Now Book Pilgrimage Packages on redBus!

redBus has been into bus ticketing for more than 10 years and from last year, we have been aggressively expanding into new categories like Hotel Booking and Bus Hire. We also experimented with few other categories like Holiday packages as well as Bus+Hotels and our focus has been to build businesses that cater to the needs of a bus traveler. During our experimentation on holiday packages, we realized that majority of Indians travel to pilgrimage destinations even for leisure purpose. In fact, research suggests that over 75% of leisure travel in India is to pilgrimage places. And yet we could not find any reliable online service provider catering to the needs of a pilgrimage traveler!

This was also validated when we experimented with this category by launching a beta product. Besides popular pilgrimages places like Tirupati, Shirdi, Vaishno Devi and Char Dham, people were also interested in traveling to other popular regional pilgrimage destinations like Kollur, Guruvayur, Palani etc. Customers who booked these packages gave thumbs up to the entire experience and were keen to travel other destinations also with us.

We thus kick-started building the end-to-end flow for this category in Jan 2017. We interviewed many users to understand their needs for a pilgrimage trip. We went to the drawing board multiple times, brainstorming and iterating on the flow that suited a pilgrimage traveler. This entire exercise was exciting and we would be sharing more details about this in our upcoming posts.

Over the last 3 months, we built the entire booking and fulfillment flow from scratch and launched it today! The booking flow is different from the usual holiday package booking flow. Users can choose the Darshan Experience, combine it with suitable Buses and Hotel and also add extra services like booking a Pooja, buying extra Prasad or going for quick sightseeing!

We have launched pilgrimage packages for Tirupati, Shirdi, Vaishno Devi, Kollur, Guruvayur, Palani, Rameshwaram, Somnath, Dwaraka, Thanjavur, Amritsar, Nathdwara, Kanchipuram, Kukke Subramanya and Tiruchendur. We will be adding more destinations soon!

If you are planning for a religious sojourn to any of these destinations, then don’t wait and book now as we are offering a FLAT 25% OFF across all packages ! This is a limited period offer, so, hurry!

Originally published at blog.redbus.in on April 10, 2017.